The nation-state is a reactionary social institution built around accidents of geography, the historical legacy of war, and the dangerous pathologies of tribal identity. We all live in the same world, and we all have a stake in everything that happens everywhere. This is particularly easy to see when you look at problems like climate change and global inequality - problems that have emerged, in part, because the victims have little-to-no control over the nations that are causing them.

Those victims should have a democratic voice in decisions that effect them. Since current international arrangements (borders, privileges of citizenship, etc) prevent this, they should be torn down - and while they are still standing, resisted. Particularly in the United States, which controls a wildly disproportionate share of the earth's resources, and which wreaks havoc on so much of the world through our military and economic power, the left should welcome a voice in our elections from the international community.

This does not, of course, mean that everyone living outside of the borders of the United States has an agenda amenable to the left. The international bourgeoisie - embodied in multinational corporations, capitalist governments, and sundry oligarchs - has always been the primary culprit in so-called "election meddling", and they should be stripped of their influence altogether. But the way you do that is not to divide the world into exclusive jurisdictions and then enforce reactionary restrictions on democracy, fetishizing the nation-state, praising its allies as "patriots" and its enemies as "traitors"; the way you prevent election-meddling by the bourgeoisie is by destroying the bourgeoisie.

Socialism has always aspired (in the long-term, if not the short-term) towards some form of global governance that can embody the will of the international proletariat. As much of our political class broods over the dangers of "Russian" influence in our elections, we should guard against the ways that this discourse casually implicates an entire nation in the crimes of its bourgeoisie. If Russiagate were simply a matter of ordinary Russians fighting for some minimal influence over a global power that touches their lives, too, why would the US left consider this a scandal?

UPDATE: In the few hours since I published this, a video has emerged that illustrates my point quite directly:

CARLSON: I don't think Russia is our close friend or anything like that. I think of course they try to interfere in our affairs. They have for a long time. Many countries do. Some more successfully than Russia, like Mexico, which is routinely interfering in our elections by packing our electorate.

The obvious objection here is that undocumented immigrants from south of the border are not "packing our electorate" - a typical study on the topic by News21, for example, found only a couple dozen instances of noncitizens voting since 2000. Still, I think the left should at least consider a more controversial objection: who cares? Imagine that every undocumented immigrant in the United States were an active voter - would this not have an instant and enormous salutary effect on our politics? And would it not, moreover, give people who have been dominated by the US government for decades some minimal voice in how it exercises its power?

Correctly, the liberal-left backlash to Carlson's statement has overwhelmingly recognized it as the flailing of a racist man. And a huge part of that racism, of course, is expressed in his paranoia: he doesn't have a reality-based understanding of the scale of voter fraud in the United States because his tribal fear of Latin Americans is blowing it all out of proportion. But another part of that racism, we should recognize, is expressed in Carlson's entitlement: he believes that certain people should not be able to democratically participate in power, even though that power is routinely exercised over them and against them.